It may not meet the strictest standards of leading polling organisations, but the views of a T-shirt hawker on a baking hot day in Portsmouth are worth repeating.

I had just bought a Bernie souvenir about half an hour after he finally endorsed Hillary Clinton as the Democratic candidate for the White House in front of a rumbustious crowd of around 3,000 at a packed high school gym in New Hampshire.

“You press?” he asked hearing my British accent. “She ain’t got it. I have sold 10 times as many Bernie shirts as Hillary ones. I sell stuff at Trump rallies and this election is going to be a lot closer than people think.”

Carting his souvenirs from rally to rally, the hawker probably has as good a handle on the mood of the country as anyone, and it is pretty clear that it is Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump who have generated the excitement and captured the imagination of voters over the past year or so.